From the heyday of infographics, when newspapers went online and explored its opportunities.

edit: I did not mean to imply information design is dead.

That's somewhat unfair to the site - they are very much still exploring how to visualize information understandably and aesthetically pleasing. Yes, they got started when infographics got really popular, but it's very much a site that's alive and continuing its work.

And really, infographics are rooted in information design. Which in itself is much older than the web. Heck, the canonical popular book - Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - is from 1982.

I know it's not the most popular thing if you can just ask Claude for a quick visualization, but the space is both very rich in information LLMs blissfully ignore, and continues to be fertile ground for explaration.